Apple in China
Issie Lapowsky (Amazon, Reddit, John Gruber):
But Cook was in Beijing that day to do the opposite: to impress upon President Xi Jinping’s government that Apple was so committed to China that it planned to spend $275 billion in the country over the next five years. “I call it a Marshall Plan for China, because I could not find any corporate spending coming close to what Apple was spending,” said Financial Times journalist Patrick McGee, who writes about this and other moments illustrating Apple’s role in enabling China’s rise in his new book Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company.
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Through interviews with more than 200 sources, more than 90% of whom worked for the tech giant at some point, the book traces the history of the company to flip the usual narrative about Apple and China on its head. By expending such exorbitant resources in China and training so many Chinese workers with its novel, hands-on approach to micromanaging foreign factories, Apple facilitated “an epic transfer of knowledge” to China, McGee told Vanity Fair.
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Apple doesn’t just hope that suppliers come up with better, lighter, stronger components and then incorporate them into the next iPhone. It is intimately working in hundreds of factories across China, making those innovations happen, and that’s how the iPhone stays ahead of everybody else.
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My favorite part of the book is about the “yellow cows,” [a slang term to describe organized scalpers] that effectively built a gig economy and distributed iPhones at marked-up prices around the country. The yellow cows found ways to make more money per iPhone than Apple.
The author, Patrick McGee, was recently on The Daily Show, The Talk Show, The AmberMac Show, and CNBC. After listening some of the interviews, this seems like the most interesting Apple book in a long time, with tons of details and anecdotes. I look forward to reading it.
Not only does it hit that crucially important overlay of the story, it provides some fascinating, and at times frightening detail in many of the design, engineering, corporate, and political maneuverings far beneath the surface of all the machinations we read about on our iPhones.
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If there is one big surprise that I think pierces the Apple aura, it’s just how little central control and understanding of what was happening on the ground in China in the helter-skelter days of early iPhone growth. What on the surface may have seemed like, and been adopted almost as mantra-like by the tech press, a giant corporation with a vision pushing buttons in Monday morning executive meetings, often feels like a company reacting to forces beyond its control that it brought into the tent.
Apple in China by @patrickmcgee.bsky.social probably the most interesting book I have read about Apple in the 25 years that I have been writing about the company. Beyond the geopolitical issues, it’s really interesting to learn all the details about how their products are built.
Previously:
- Apple Removes Messaging Apps From Chinese App Store
- Apple’s Problem With Lina Khan
- iPhone Parts Pairing
- The Problem With China and AI
- Tim Cook’s Secret $275 Billion Deal With China
- A Hard Bargain for Apple in China
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Besides the numerous exclusive anecdotes I’m really enjoying the author anchoring design/manufacturing/hiring decisions around the reality of Apple’s finances; which is the coarse part I royally ignored when naively getting enamored with Apple’s product design. (I’m a third in, just past the chapter introducing The Blevinator.)
